A Parent's Guide for Suicidal and Depressed Teens (27 page)

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Authors: Kate Williams

Tags: #Family & Relationships, #Life Stages, #Teenagers, #Self-Help, #Depression, #test

BOOK: A Parent's Guide for Suicidal and Depressed Teens
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Page 159
mysterious and mechanical than my new ten-speed bikefrom a copy of
Our Bodies, Our Selves
stolen from my school library. I had learned enough to know I could be pregnant.
I tell my mother about what happened the next morning as we sit in the car, in the driveway, in the sun. I want her to help me, to take care of me, because there is something unraveling, unzipping inside of me that I can't name. Her white knuckles grip the steering wheel and she cries, wringing those white hands together, "Oh no, what will we do?" I am slowly becoming wooden.
My sawdust voice tells her my plan, carefully constructed with the phone crisis worker last night while everyone slept, it seemed, but me and that strange woman. She was fantastic to me, the first adult who ever spoke a word about sex to me. Her voice is calm, steady, explaining to me a thing called "the morning after" pill, giving me the names of doctors progressive enough to prescribe it.
The doctor examines me, writes a prescriptionfour pills, one for each of the next four days. "They'll make you pretty sick," he warns me. Then, "I can give you a prescription for birth control pills, too...."
"No, thank you," I answer primly, as if being passed a tray of cookies at a tea party, "No, I don't think so." A week later I walk the school hallway with wooden legs. Glen and David don't speak to me, but their eyes are amused, knowing. I wonder what they know, and I am marked, branded. I want to slink away, not even a mother would take me in
 
Page 160
now. Do they know that I spent four days retching in bed, a burning liquid moving snake-like up my throat? That I lay doubled over with cramping, my arms wrapped around myself, while I listened to my mother stay busier than usual in the kitchen, thumping pans around? What I know is that I can't feel any more and that my tears are nothing more than chips of ice. What I know is something I can't understand, but I will live out the lesson in this body of wood, not fit for building or burning.
MARY B. KAHLE
Being a Young Man
The irony of adolescent suicide is that males typically don't show as much depression as females do, yet they kill themselves more often. They also have a high rate of fatal car accidents, often considered hidden suicides. Young African American men and other minority men have a very high homicide rate, which reflects their despair about fitting into the white world. This homicidal behavior might also be construed as hidden suicide.
Nobody really knows why more boys kill themselves than girls. One reason may be that more boys have been trained in the use of weapons and have easier access to them, so they have the means available when there is a motive and opportunity. Whatever the reason, parents of suicidal boys must take precautions with the weapons in the house. Take the warning seriously.

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